New Greenbush line taking time to catch on
Many quit commuter boat, not car, to ride the rails
By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff | January 29, 2008
Buy a ticket for the new $513 million commuter train line and take a seat. Better yet, take two seats. Lie down on a row of three if you want. There is plenty of room.
Some commuters have been giving the train from Greenbush Station in Scituate to Boston a try, but the line has yet to catch on as a top commuting option to Boston.
More troubling: A third of the riders in the first two months were former passengers on the Hingham commuter boat, which would seem contrary to one of the train's primary goals, relieving highway congestion from the South Shore.
The MBTA counted an average of 1,368 daily round-trip riders for the Greenbush rail line in December, a steady increase from the 893 customers on its first morning, Oct. 31. The line was projected to attract about 4,300 daily commuters within three to five years of opening, but the T says it never estimated how many riders the line would attract before that.
During one recent 5:45 p.m. train ride out of South Station, there were not enough passengers to fill all six train cars. Conductors kept two closed so they would not have to monitor sparsely-occupied cars. Just 10 passengers rode on one car that was open.
MBTA and other state transportation managers say it will take at least a year to judge the effectiveness of the line. They caution against drawing strong conclusions before 2010.
"You have an immediate market of early adaptors" with most new rail lines, said Bernard Cohen, the state transportation secretary. Others catch on later because of frustration with gas prices, traffic, or other issues, he said.
Still, early signs suggest the train is not taking many cars off the road.
"It's all the boat people," said Connie Swift, a Scituate resident who switched from the boat and now rides the train five days a week from Greenbush, which is just 2 miles from her home. "We had a 45-minute drive to Hingham, so this is very accommodating."
Both the boat and the train are run by private contractors for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority as part of the state's extensive mass transit web. In other words, the state is competing with itself.
Governor Deval Patrick has made further expansion of commuter rail a transportation priority. He has contended that the economic benefits of bringing commuter service to Fall River and New Bedford by 2016 would justify the estimated $1.4 billion expense. Cohen said the Fall River-New Bedford project is unusual in that early planning efforts are focused as much on economic development and community planning as environmental factors.
Greenbush is the first commuter rail line to open in a decade and even early commuting trends could prove instructive in the Fall River-New Bedford debate.
Before the Greenbush opened, the Hingham boat had been gaining passengers. But as train traffic grew in December, the Hingham boat drew 432 fewer round-trip passengers than it did in December 2006, when 1,396 commuters took the boat.
The MBTA's data show that combined, the boat and the train drew 936 new passengers to public transportation in December. The numbers were similar in November.
Some of the old faces are no longer riding the boat, said Mark Nolan, dock manager for the boat at Rowes Warf. "It's noticeable." (The commuter boat is one of three services run by Boston Harbor Cruises and subsidized by the MBTA.)
On boats and train cars, the competition has initiated a friendly rivalry among the passengers who have gotten to know each other over the years.
"People who take the train are traitors," joked Beth Harrington, a paralegal from Marshfield who was sipping a glass of red wine by the bar on the boat and reading a newspaper during a recent evening commute.
The boat offers an afternoon happy hour and, in the morning, coffee and pastries. Those amenities, combined with a wide-open layout, create a more social experience on the boat.
The train, on the other hand, stops closer to many people's homes and allows riders a shorter walk, an especially attractive feature during lousy weather. The Hingham Shipyard lies next to a large parking lot and the walk can be long for latecomers.
On the train, "you don't get soaking-wet walking from the parking lot," said Jeffery Ritz, a Cohasset commuter who switched from the boat on an especially rainy morning and never went back.
Ellen Hoadley of Norwell said that on her first day on the train she felt as though she had a private coach. She rode the Kingston line before that, but likes the ease of parking at the emptier Greenbush lots. "Once people ride it, they like it," she said.
The cost of the boat and the train are comparable: from Hingham, the train costs $7.25 with parking per trip; the boat costs $7 with parking. Both offer discounts with weekly and monthly passes.
The train is drawing new passengers at about the same rate as the other two legs of what is known as the Old Colony route - the Plymouth and Middleborough lines - when they opened in 1998, according to MBTA statistics. Those two lines now draw a combined 5,700 daily riders.
The difference in those communities: They were attracting commuters new to public transportation instead of existing transit riders.
While acknowledging that the boat presents a new wrinkle, MBTA managers say it is premature to start looking for trends.
Robert DiAdamo, deputy general manager of the MBTA, said it takes time for commuters to alter their routines, and new railroads are built with a long view toward the future. As developers move in to take advantage of the transit link, more riders will move in and the economy will benefit, he said.
"These are long-term substantial benefits to the Commonwealth. They are truly generational," DiAdamo said.
In the short term, switching from the boat to the train relieves the traffic from people driving to Hingham from other South Shore communities, DiAdamo said.
One sign of encouragement for Greenbush backers is that riders are increasingly loyal. Keith Wilson, a salesman from Marshfield, said he sees more people joining him every day. He has driven to work a few times, but has not seen the reduction in traffic yet.
"I drive an SUV," he said. "It's nice to retire that for a while."
Noah Bierman can be reached at
nbierman@globe.com.
